Global justice: a cosmopolitan account

Abstract

Gillian Brock, Global justice: a cosmopolitan account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), ISBN 978-0-19-923093-8 (Hbk), 978-0-19-923094-5 (Pbk), US$110, 366 pages with index and bibliography (also available as electronic download @ US$22).

This is a review of Gillian Brock's new book, Global justice: a cosmopolitan account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) which sets out the central theses of the book and then offers a critical appraisal of its central arguments. My specific concern is that Brock gives an insufficiently robust account of human rights with which to define the nature of global justice and thereby leaves cosmopolitanism too vulnerable to the normative pull of local and traditional moral conceptions that fall short of the universalism that cosmopolitans should be able to embrace.

• cosmopolitanism
• human rights
• global justice
• Rawls
• humanitarian intervention
• global governance
• liberal nationalism
• democracy
• equality
• immigration

Notes

1. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

2. Charles Beitz, ‘International Liberalism and Distributive Justice: A Survey of Recent Thought’, World Politics 51, no. 2 (1999): 269–96. Thomas Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). See also, Brian Barry, ‘Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective’, in Nomos XXIV: Ethics, Economics and the Law, eds. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 219–52.

3. Carolyn Webb, ‘Of Rights and Men: for Local Afghan Women Democracy still a Concept out of Their World’. The Age (August 21, 2009), 1.

4. Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Women and Cultural Universals’ in her Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 29–54, 41. Nussbaum has put forward a newer version of her list of capabilities in her, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 76–77.

5. Stan van Hooft, Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics (Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2009), 79.

6. Henry Shue, ‘Conditional Sovereignty’, Res Publica 8, no. 1 (1999): 1–7.